Founders and Business Owners

For families whose wealth is concentrated in the company they built.

You built the business. Most of what you are worth sits inside it, in one currency, in one sector, under one management team. On paper the figure is substantial. In practice very little of it is available to you, and almost none of it produces income independent of the company continuing to trade.

Separating your personal financial position from the business protects both. It gives the household an income base that does not depend on this year’s trading, and it gives the company an owner who is not obliged to take money out at the wrong moment. Founders who do this work early do it calmly. Founders who leave it tend to be doing it in the middle of a transaction, an illness, or an estate, middle of a crisis, when the business and the household need the same money at the same time.

Scenario 1

Wealth that only exist on paper

Your net worth and your available capital are different numbers, and the gap is usually wider than the family assumes. A valuation is not liquidity. Land held for years is not liquidity. A company that reinvests everything it earns is not producing income for the household, however much it is worth. The first piece of work is establishing what you actually hold in producing assets, as distinct from what you would be worth in a sale that has not happened.

Scenario 2

The company and the household draw on one pool

School fees, property purchases, medical costs, and family obligations are met from the same account that funds payroll and working capital. The arrangement works while trading is good and becomes the problem when it is not. We help founders build a personal asset base that is genuinely separate, funded deliberately from the business rather than opportunistically, so that a difficult quarter does not reach the household.

Scenario 3

The business depends on relationships held in your name

Banking terms, supplier credit, regulatory contacts, and pricing authority frequently sit with the founder personally and are documented nowhere. If you are unavailable for six months, the company loses more than its chief executive. That exposure is worth naming, insuring against, and reducing, and it is the point at which succession planning stops being a document and becomes an operational question.

What we do here

Establish the producing asset base you hold outside the business, and the freedom number it needs to reach.

Build a personal portfolio deliberately diversified away from the sector, currency, and economy the business already exposes you to.

Document the shareholding as it actually stands, which is frequently not as the family believes, and work with your lawyers on the succession and shareholder arrangements that follow from it.

Audit key-person and life cover against the exposure the company and the family actually carry.